10. Harrison
— ? —
Harrison
Val comes home from school with a paper folded into eighths and the expression of someone handed a problem beneath her pay grade.
“I have a project,” she says.
“Okay.”
“On an animal.” She spreads the paper on the kitchen island and smooths it with both palms, twice, like the creases have personally wronged her. “Mrs. Patterson says we pick one and we say three facts and we make a poster.”
I read over her shoulder. ANIMAL RESEARCH PROJECT, printed in a font working very hard to seem fun. Due in two weeks. Parents are encouraged to assist, but the work should be the student’s own.
“So what are you picking?”
“I don’t know.” She climbs onto the stool. “Emma’s doing a panda. Sophie’s doing a panda. Ruby’s doing a panda.”
“Pandas are overexposed.”
“What’s overexposed?”
“It means everybody already knows about it, so nobody’s impressed.” I get the juice out. “It’d be like standing up in front of your class and announcing that water is wet.”
Val props her chin on her fist and thinks about this with her whole face. “So I need one nobody knows about.”
“You need one nobody knows about.”
I want it on the record that there was a moment right here. A fork in the road. A version of this afternoon where a reasonable man says owls are cool, buddy and goes back to the dishes.
By Thursday I’ve watched eleven hours of material on Arctic terns.
I know this number because Geo says it out loud at breakfast, in the flat voice of someone reading a diagnosis off a chart. She’s holding her coffee with both hands and looking at the laptop I left open on the counter, still paused on a frame of forty thousand birds coming off a beach in Iceland.
“Eleven hours.”
“That’s the autoplay. That’s not a fair number.”
“It logs you, Harrison. It knows what you did.”
“Some of that was background.”
“You took notes.” She turns the legal pad toward me without picking it up, the way you’d angle evidence at a jury. “There’s a diagram.”
“That’s the migration route.”
“It’s got arrows.”
“It’s got two arrows. It goes down and then it comes back up. That’s the entire thing they do.” I hear my own voice climbing and can’t stop it. “That’s the point, Geo. Pole to pole. Every year. They’re the size of your hand.”
She takes a sip of her coffee. She doesn’t say anything.
“Forty thousand miles,” I say.
“Mm.”
“They see more daylight than any animal alive. Any animal. They chase the summer down one end of the planet and then they turn around and chase it back, their whole lives, and then they die of nothing in particular at thirty.”
“Thirty.”
“They live longer than dogs and they never stop moving. Nobody knows how they navigate. Nobody. There are three theories and they all contradict each other.”
Geo sets the mug down. Her mouth is doing a thing at one corner that she’s trying to prevent.
“You emailed someone,” she says.
“I emailed a researcher in Reykjavík.”
“You emailed a researcher in Reykjavík.”
“He wrote back.”
That’s what does it. She makes a sound she absolutely didn’t authorize, half laugh and half a noise scraped out of her chest, and she turns toward the sink fast, and her shoulders go once.
I’ve played arenas. I’ve had whole rooms scream my name back at me in a language I don’t speak. None of it has ever hit like the noise my wife just made into a dish rack because I told her a bird scientist answered my email.
She recovers. She always recovers. When she turns around her face has closed most of the way back up.
“Val is six,” she says. “The poster has to be Val’s.”
“The poster is one hundred percent Val’s.”
“Harrison.”
“She’s the one holding the glue.”
“That’s not the standard.”
“It’s a standard.”
The poster isn’t one hundred percent Val’s.
I’d put it at seventy. Maybe sixty-eight, if you’re counting the lamination, and I’d argue you shouldn’t count the lamination, because Val isn’t legally permitted to operate a laminator and I checked.
We work at the kitchen table after dinner, the good markers out, the cheap markers exiled to a shoebox because Val has determined that the cheap ones “smell like a hospital.” She’s drawing the bird herself.
She’s been drawing the bird herself for four evenings and it has been the same bird every time, and every time it comes out looking mildly threatening.
“Does it look like a bird?”
“It looks like a bird.”
“Daddy.”
“It looks like a bird that owes somebody money.”
Val puts down the marker and stares at me and then she laughs so hard she gets the hiccups, and she keeps laughing through the hiccups, which makes a sound roughly like a bicycle pump. From the living room I hear the television go quiet.
Geo appears in the doorway with a book hanging from one hand. She takes in the table. The markers. The laminated fact cards, which I’ll defend to my last breath. Her daughter, wheezing.
“What.”
“Daddy said my bird owes money.”
“Your father would know.” Geo comes into the room and picks up one of the cards and reads it. “‘The Arctic tern can live to be thirty-four years old and has never once been in therapy.’”
“That one’s a joke card,” I say.
“There’s a joke card.”
“There’s four real ones and a joke card. She’s six, Geo, she has to hold the room.”
“She has to hold the room.”
“You’ve never seen a first grader lose an audience. It’s brutal. It’s the Apollo.”
Geo puts the card down. She looks at me for a beat too long, and I watch her decide not to say whatever came up first, and then she pulls out the chair across from Val and sits.
She sits.
She’s been in this house eight days and she hasn’t once sat down in a room I was already in.
“Okay,” she says to Val. “Read me the real ones.”
Val reads me the real ones. All four. She mispronounces Antarctic every single time and refuses correction, on the grounds that her way sounds better, which is an argument I’ve made professionally and lost.
Geo listens with her chin on her hand. She asks a follow-up question.
She asks a second one. At one point she says, “Wait, so they never see winter?” and I say no, they never do, they’ve engineered their entire lives around never having to sit in the dark, and Geo goes quiet and looks at the poster for a second longer than the poster requires.
Then she stands up.
“Bath,” she says to Val. “Twenty minutes ago.”
“But the poster.”
“The bird will still owe money tomorrow.”
Val goes. Geo starts stacking the markers back into the box, and I start gathering the cards, and our hands cross once over the table and neither of us says anything about it.
“You laughed earlier,” I say. I shouldn’t. I know it’s a mistake the second it’s out.
She doesn’t look up from the markers. “At the bird.”
“Right,” I agree, and let her keep it, because she needs the bird more than I need the truth, and because the tips of her ears have gone pink and I’ve quietly decided that part’s mine even if the laugh technically wasn’t.
“You could have just picked an owl,” she says.
“I know.”
“Everyone else’s dad picked an owl.”
“I’m aware.”
She snaps the lid on the marker box. She’s smiling and she hates it, I can see her hating it, she’s got her jaw set against it and it’s leaking out the sides anyway.
“You’ve always been like this,” she says. “I forgot. I don’t know how you forget a thing like that about a person, but I did.”
“Geo.”
“Don’t.” She picks up the box. “That wasn’t for you. I was just saying it out loud.”
She goes. I hear the water start upstairs, and Val’s voice, and then Val’s voice louder because she’s retelling the joke about the bird to her mother, who has already heard it.
I sit at the kitchen table with a laminated card in my hand and I don’t move.
Eight days. One laugh into a dish rack, one question about winter, one sentence she took back before it landed.
I’d have written a song for less. I’ve written worse songs for more.